Scandinavian Languages: Which One to Learn?

Language Services Direct Team

Here at Language Services Direct, we are experts at providing language training in the big languages for business such as Mandarin, Spanish, German and Arabic (head here for an article on which languages are in demand for business right now). But we also love teaching the less obvious ones, including several Scandinavian languages: Swedish, Danish and Finnish. If your business has dealings in Scandinavia, learning one of these languages can significantly improve your business relations and career prospects. If you are thinking of relocating to enjoy the famously high standard of living in Scandinavia, learning the language of your country of choice is important for getting a head start before moving.

In this article, we take a closer look at these three fascinating languages.

Studying Swedish

Sweden is rightly celebrated for giving the world the joys of ABBA and IKEA – and the country is also admired for having one of the highest quality of life rankings in the world. The majority of Swedes are highly educated and employment rates are high. Sweden has one of the highest performing financial markets in the world, and is ranked tenth out of 190 economies for ease of doing business. Sweden is renowned for being a leader in innovation, and jostles for position with Silicon Valley for headquartering billion-dollar technology companies. Fun fact: Spotify, Klarna and Skype were first launched as start-ups in Stockholm.

If your company is looking to expand to Sweden, or if you need to communicate with colleagues there, learning Swedish makes good business sense. Written Swedish may look rather unfamiliar to British eyes, with no less than nine vowels, some with umlauts and rings over certain letters to show whether they have soft or hard pronunciation. However, Swedish does share similarities with English, with cognates (similar sounding words) such as studera (study) and jobb (job), and the same sentence structure as English (subject-verb-object). So you need not be too intimidated!

Swedish is often considered to be the key to the other Scandinavian languages, as there is a lot of crossover. In fact, Swedish shares a lot of vocabulary with Danish, although the pronunciation is often quite different. Time to turn our attention to Danish…

Delving into Danish

Nearly 6 million people speak Danish, the mother tongue of Hans Christian Anderson (of fairytale fame). These days, industry in Denmark has a particular focus on renewable energy, biotech and life sciences. Denmark is also the proud home of LEGO, of course! Denmark can boast that it is a ‘green’ land (Greenland is part of the realm of Denmark, but we digress…), with more bikes on the road than cars. Being a very flat country helps encourage cycling, no doubt! Danes are proud to have energy-efficient buildings, with Rockwool insulation and VELUX windows founded in Denmark. Wind farms provide Denmark with 41 per cent of its energy. Denmark takes global second place in countries that are easy to do business with. So, if you want to work in or with this fantastic country, what about the language?

Danish is similar to English in terms of grammar and vocabulary, but the pronunciation is tricky, we admit, with 20 different vowel sounds and the glottal stop to contend with. If you already know Swedish, you will have a head start as both languages share vocabulary (as mentioned above). To become familiar with the Danish language, watch famous crime dramas The Bridge (where you will also hear Swedish), Borgen or The Killing.

Focusing on Finnish

You may be considering learning Finnish if your company does business with Finland – which takes the number one spot for being the best global business environment, as well as being rated the happiest country in the world. With a burgeoning economy, especially in areas of tech, engineering and healthcare, and the lowest rate of corporate tax in Scandinavia, your business may be keen to expand to Finland.

While other Scandinavian languages are related, Finnish is the outlier here. Finnish is related to Hungarian rather than the Old Norse (North Germanic) that the other Scandinavian languages are rooted in. For example, while ‘thank you’ in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian is a variation of ‘takk’, Finns say ‘kiitos’. There is no doubt that it is a challenging language to learn – with no gender but each verb has 200 possible endings – but at least pronunciation is easy, with most words spoken how they are written.

Get in touch to discover how we can help to meet your goal of learning a Scandinavian language – including Norwegian, which we ran out of room for here. At the start of each course, you will receive a comprehensive language training plan so that you know what to expect and how much progress you will make – from the very first lesson.